The present invention relates to informatics management, and more particularly, the present invention relates to an informatics management system that provides a user in a specialized field with a gateway to globally access and use various remote data repositories, systems, and services that are related to the specific field.
Over the years, numerous data repositories and services have been developed and have been made accessible to serve users in various specialties and technical fields. Large data repositories have been developed and have been maintained to serve the fields of medicine, law, economics, meteorology, ecology, commerce, and the government, as well as many other fields and disciplines. These data repositories have been made available to users in these various fields or to the public-at-large via networks, online, or more recently, the Internet.
For example, in the field of medicine, data repositories have been developed and maintained for pharmaceutical information, case histories, etc. In the field of law, information databases are maintained for state and federal statutes, administrative regulations, and court decisions. Also, various data repositories have been developed by government bodies to provide population and census statistics, meteorological information, economic information, environmental information, etc.
These data repositories have been developed over many years and have been designed to address specific user needs. For these reasons, these various data repository systems have different data structures, query formats, communications protocols, and many have specialized user interfaces to permit users to access the systems.
Another example of an area in which data repositories have developed are the fields of molecular and structural biology research. Over the years, genome sequencing projects have been developed for a variety of organisms, including the nematode, yeast, and human genomes, and the first complete genome has been published. Sequence data has grown rapidly. As sequencing and structure determination projects proceed, the nature of bench work in the fields of molecular biology and structural biology change, becoming increasingly dependent upon information retrieval.
Currently, biologist researchers rely heavily upon sequence databases like GenBank, PIR, Swiss-Prot and PDB which contain sequence and structure information for all species. Computational tools like BLAST, FASTA, and GenQuest allow the researcher to access that information. Other programs like PSA, Grail, and MSA are used to analyze the sequence information held in the sequence databases. In addition, the biologist researcher uses literature databases like MEDLINE and Biosys and species-specific genetic databases like GDB, FlyBASE, and ACeDB, and sequence and structure databases like PDB. These databases vary in data content, as well as in internal structure and in internal rules and formats. While most of these sources are easily accessible online by personal computers, they are accessed by disparate query mechanisms. Therefore, the biologist researcher must understand several different query languages and formats. Also, integrating the results from these different databases is burdensome. Accordingly, there is a need for global communication of information in molecular biology.
As mentioned above, a field that includes disparate information systems is the field of medicine. The medical community has many types of informatics systems--some of which are computer-based and many of which are based on paper records. Some of the paper record systems date from early in this century. Where computer-based systems are used, they are often used for specific or narrow-scope applications. The computer-based systems that are currently used include various methodologies, such as CD-ROM's , commercial online systems of limited scope and functionality, and hundreds of individual Web-based pages.
There is a need for global communication of information in medicine. Providing global communication of information in the medical community would reduce the administrative burden borne by doctors and other medical professionals thereby allowing them to spend relatively more time on patient care.
In addition to the fields of molecular and structural biology and medicine, many other fields of specialties and disciplines face similar problems. Accordingly, there is a need for a system that enables a specialist in any particular field to access numerous available information systems related to that particular field in a global, efficient, and comprehensive manner.
The Internet has emerged as the standard computer network for users throughout the world to communicate with each other. Increasingly, users of the Internet employ browser applications, such as NCSA Mosaic, to access the World Wide Web.
Although many existing data repositories are accessible over the Internet, some are not. However, among the data repositories that are accessible over the Internet, many present unique or proprietary interfaces once the user is connected. Further, because many of the data repositories have different structures, the types of queries that a user would present to one repository might be very different from the queries that would be put to another repository. Accordingly, although much information is available over the Internet to specialists in many fields, and to the general population, much of the information is stored in dissimilar systems. Thus, a person wanting to search several of these systems must access each of them separately and organize all the received information locally after it has been downloaded.